One of the things that turns off a lot of technical people about journaling is that nearly everything you can find about it focuses on topics that most techies just aren’t interested in, at least not in the soft way they’re treated. A lot of what’s written about journaling is introspective, examining your life or other people’s lives. More like a young girl’s diary than a journal.

If you go into a store to buy a journal and look at what they offer, you’ll see covers with flowers, and jewelry, and all sorts of other things associated with femininity and not with technology. I have yet to find a notebook offered as a journal with pictures of computers on the cover. :o)

That being said, a journal doesn’t have to be about self-exploration or keeping a record of life-events. I’m afraid that I learned to keep a journal more in the spirit of the stereotypical 19th century gentleman scientist. It’s a place to record notes, observations, sketches, or whatever associated with what I’m working on. As Steve Pavlina discusses in his recent post Journaling as a Problem-Solving Tool, it’s also a great place to think about problem solving. This alone makes it an ideal tool for making your ideas clear.

I learned journaling by keeping lab notebooks in college. I expanded to using notebooks for all my courses and eventually for all of my learning as well.

Using a notebook for problem solving was best expressed in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, “Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,” and you crank up the formal scientific method.

“For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up. In cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion starts it’s a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are.”

Categories: Practical Applications, The process